THE CONSCIOUS MIND

By David Chalmers
 BIOGRAPHY
David Chalmers

• Born in Sydney Australia April 20, 1966.

Education:

• 1983-1986: University of Adelaide.

• Honours Degree of Bachelor of Science, in Pure
Mathematics.

• 1987-1988: University of Oxford.

• Graduate student in Mathematics.

• 1989-1993: Indiana University.

• Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Cognitive
Science.
 BIOGRAPHY
David Chalmers
“Consciousness is
my first love” • Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition

• 1993-1995: McDonnell Fellow, Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology,

Washington University.

• Co-founded the :

• Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness,.

• The PhilPapers Foundation, and three different Centers for

Consciousness

Books Authored:

• The Conscious Mind: In search of Fundamental theory. Oxford

University press, 1996.

• The Character of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010.

• Constructing the World. Oxford University Press, 2012.

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PART 1 FOUNDATION
CHAPTER 1
Two concepts of mind
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

Why Consciousness

Consciousness is a mysterious,
fundamental fact of life that is
almost wholly unexplained.
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“Conscious experience is at once

the most familiar thing in the world
and the most mysterious.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“Given that so many mental terms

have a dual nature, it will not be
surprising to learn that even
’consciousness’ has both
phenomenal and psychological
senses.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

Of Two Minds

Consciousness is the subjective

experience of certain qualities.
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

Experiences based on consciousness include:

•What you see •What you feel

•What you hear •What you smell

Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“Even after we have explained the

physical and computational
functioning of a conscious system,
we still need to explain why the
system has conscious
experiences.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“The primary nexus of the

relationship between
consciousness and cognition lies in
phenomenal judgments.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“Almost all facts supervene

logically on the physical facts
(including physical laws), with
possible exceptions for conscious
experience, indexicality and
negative existential facts.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

Psychological and
Phenomenal Components
Psychological and
phenomenological dimensions
account totally for the mind.
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“As Hume argued, external

evidence only gives us access to
regularities of succession between
events; it does not give us access
to any further fact of causation.”
Chapter 1: Two concepts of mind

“This failure of materialism leads to

a kind of dualism: there are both
physical and nonphysical features
of the world.”
 CHAPTER 2
Supervenience and Explanation
Chapter 2: Supervenience and Explanation

“As Hume argued, external

evidence only gives us access to
regularities of succession between
events; it does not give us access
to any further fact of causation.”
Chapter 2: Supervenience and Explanation

Supervenience can be local or global:

LOCAL SUPERVENIENCE GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE

One set of a specific item’s This refers to entire worlds rather
properties determines another than individual entities.
set of its properties.
Chapter 2: Supervenience and Explanation

“Although greenness is a distinct

sort of sensation with a rich
intrinsic character, there is very little
that one can say about it other than
that it is green.”
Chapter 2: Supervenience and Explanation

“As Hume argued, external

evidence only gives us access to
regularities of succession between
events; it does not give us access
to any further fact of causation.”
 The Irreducibility of
PART 2 Consciousness
CHAPTER 3
Can consciousness be
reductively explained?
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness NO
logically supervenient on !
the physical?

Consciousness can not be

logically supervenient on the
physical and this is argued
by him using conceivability,
epistemology, and
analysis.
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 1:
The logical possibility of zombies

Psychological zombies –also

called as Hollywood zombies
which eat human flesh

Philosophical zombies –
zombies that are exact copies
of us but lacks consciousness
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 1:
The logical possibility of zombies
“A zombie is physically identical to a normal human
being, but completely lacks conscious experience.
Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings
that we know, but "all is dark inside.“ There is
nothing like to be a zombie.”

David Chalmers Zombie David Chalmers

Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 2:
The inverted spectrum
“Logically there should be a world physically
identical to ours but the facts about conscious
experience are merely different from the facts in
our world. One can coherently imagine a physically
identical world in which conscious experiences are
inverted, or a being physically identical to us but
with inverted conscious experiences.”

David Chalmers in our world David Chalmers in another world

Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 3:
From epistemic asymmetry

“There is an epistemic asymmetry in our

knowledge of consciousness that is not
present in our knowledge of other
phenomena. Our knowledge that
conscious experience exists derives
primarily from our own case, with external
evidence playing at best a secondary role.”
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 4:
The knowledge of argument

“The physical facts do not

logically involve the facts
about conscious experience.”
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.1. Is consciousness logically supervenient on the physical?

ARGUMENT # 5:
From the absence of analysis

“For consciousness to be entailed by a set

of physical facts, one would need some kind
of analysis of the notion of consciousness—
the kind of analysis whose satisfaction
physical facts could imply—and there is no
such analysis to be had. The only analysis
of consciousness that seems even remotely
tenable for these purposes is a functional
analysis.”
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.2 Cognitive Modeling

Cognitive Model describes

how people’s perception or
spontaneous thoughts about
a certain situation influence
their emotional, behavioral
(and often physiological)
reactions.
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.2 Cognitive Modeling

Cognitive modeling works well for most

problems in cognitive science. By exhibiting
a model of the causal dynamics involved in
cognitive processes, one can explain the
causation of behavior in a cognitive agent.
This provides a valuable kind of explanation
for psychological phenomena, such as
learning, memory, perception, control of
action, attention, categorization, linguistic
behavior, and so on.
“This is insufficient to explain
consciousness. For any model we exhibit,
it remains a further question why
realization of the model should be
accompanied by consciousness. This is
not a question that description and
analysis of the model alone can answer.”
-David, Chalmers
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.3 The Appeal to New Physics

“Sometimes it is held that the key to the explanation of consciousness may lie
in a new sort of physical theory. Perhaps, in arguing that consciousness is not
entailed by the physics of our world, we have been tacitly assuming that the
physics of our world is something like physics as we understand it today,
consisting in an arrangement of particles and fields in the spatiotemporal
manifold, undergoing complex processes of causation and evolution. An
opponent might agree that nothing in this sort of physics entails the existence
of consciousness, but argue that there might be a new kind of physical theory
from which consciousness falls out as a consequence.”
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

3.4 Evolutionary explanation

“Even those who take consciousness seriously are often drawn to the idea of an
evolutionary explanation of consciousness. After all, consciousness is such a
ubiquitous and central feature that it seems that it must have arisen during the
evolutionary process for a reason. It is natural to suppose that it arose because
there is some function that it serves that could not be achieved without it. If we could
get a clear enough idea of the relevant function, then we would have some idea of
why consciousness exists.”
Chapter 3: Can consciousness be reductively explained?

Can consciousness be
reductively explained?
No.
“For an explanation of consciousness, then, we
must look elsewhere. We certainly need not give
up on explanation; we need only give up on
reductive explanation. The possibility of
explaining consciousness non-reductively
remains open. This would be a very different sort
of explanation, requiring some radical changes in
the way we think about the structure of the world.
But if we make these changes, the beginnings of
a theory of consciousness may become visible in
the distance.”
CHAPTER 4
Naturalistic Dualism
Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism

4.1 An argument against

materialism

Materialism is a form of The failure of logical

philosophical monism that
holds that matter is the
fundamental substance in
nature, and that all things,
including mental states and
consciousness, are results of
material interactions.
supervenience physically
directly implies that
materialism is false: there
are features of the world
over and above the physical
features.
Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism

4.1 An argument against materialism

Basic arguments:

1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.

2. There is a logically possible world physically identical
to ours, in which the positive facts about
consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further
facts about our world, over and above the physical
facts.
4. So materialism is false.
Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism

4.1 An argument against materialism

DUALISM

The theory that the mental and

the physical – or mind and body
or mind and brain – are, in some
sense, radically different kinds of
thing.
Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism

4.1 An argument against materialism

“If ones physical structure were

to be replicated by some
creature in the actual world, his
conscious experience would be
replicated, too. So it remains
plausible that consciousness
supervenes naturally on the
physical.”
Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism

4.1 An argument against materialism

NATURALISTIC DUALISM

David Chalmers’ basic thesis about mind-

body problems. Naturalistic because he
believes mental states supervenes "naturally"
on physical systems (such as brains); dualist
because he believes mental states are
ontologically distinct from and not reducible
to physical systems.
 CHAPTER 5

T H E PA R A D OX O F
PHENOMENAL JUDGEMENT

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 TITLE

CONSCIOUSNESS COGNITION

• Mysterious • Not mysterious

• Ontologically novel • Ontological free lunch

• Resists such explanation • Can be explained

• Governed in part by functionally

independent psychophysical • Governed entirely by the

laws laws of physics

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 PHENOMENAL JUDGEMENTS
• Primary nexus of relationship between
consciousness and cognition

1. First-order Judgements - judgments that

go along with conscious experiences,
concerning not the experience itself but the
object of the experience.
PHENOMENAL JUDGEMENTS
2. Second-order Judgements - These are
more straightforwardly judgments about
conscious experiences.

3. Third-order Judgements - judgments

about conscious experience as a type.
These go beyond judgments about
particular experiences.
 THE PARADOX OF PHENOMENAL JUDGEMENT
The existence of phenomenal judgments reveals a
central tension within a nonreductive theory of
consciousness. The problem is this. We have seen that
consciousness itself cannot be reductively explained. But
phenomenal judgments lie in the domain of psychology
and in principle should be reductively explainable by the
usual methods of cognitive science.

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 ON EXPLAINING PHENOMENAL JUDGEMENT

Given what has gone before, explaining why we say the

things we do about consciousness emerges as a reasonable and
interesting project for cognitive science. These claims are
behavioral acts and should be as susceptible to explanation as any
other behavioral act. Explaining our claims and judgments about
consciousness may be difficult, but it will not be as difficult as
explaining consciousness itself.

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ARGUMENTS AGAINST EXPLANATORY IRRELEVANCE

1. The Argument from Self-Knowledge

- The most difficult problem posed by explanatory irrelevance is our
knowledge of our own conscious experiences. On the face of it, we do not
just judge that we have conscious experiences; we know that we have
conscious experiences. But if a nonreductive view is right, then experience
is explanatorily irrelevant to the formation of the judgment; the same
judgment would have been formed even if experience were absent. It may
therefore seem hard to see how that judgment can qualify as knowledge.

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ARGUMENTS AGAINST EXPLANATORY IRRELEVANCE

2. The Argument from Memory

- The second objection to the causal or explanatory irrelevance

of experience is that it is incompatible with the fact that we
remember our experiences. “It certainly seems that I often remember
my old experiences, as when I recall the tangy odor of mothballs in a
closet when I was a child, or when I recollect a particularly vivid
experience of orange while I was watching the sun set last night.”

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ARGUMENTS AGAINST EXPLANATORY IRRELEVANCE

3. The Argument from Reference

- The third argument against the causal or explanatory irrelevance of
consciousness is that it is incompatible with our ability to refer to our
conscious experiences. Certainly, it seems that we can think about our
conscious experiences and talk about them. But it is sometimes held that
reference to an entity requires a causal connection to that entity; this is
known as the causal theory of reference. If so, then it would be impossible
to refer to causally irrelevant experiences.

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T H E CO N T E N T O F P H E N O M E N A L B E L I E FS

First, there are questions about the nature of our concepts'

intensions, both for general concepts such as "consciousness“ and for
more specific concepts such as "red experience": Just what do they
pick out in a given world? And second, there are questions about what
constitutes the content of our concepts: Is the content constituted by
our psychological nature alone, or by our psychological and
phenomenal nature, and what role do each of these play?

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 PA R T 3

THE COHERENCE BETWEEN

CONSCIOUNESS AND
COGNITION

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 CH APTER 6

TOWARD A THEO RY OF
CO NS CIOU S N ES S

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TOWARD A NONREDUCTIVE THEORY

Even if consciousness cannot be

reductively explained, there can still be a
theory of consciousness. We simply need to
move to a nonreductive theory instead. We can
give up on the project of trying to explain the
existence of consciousness wholly in terms of
something more basic, and instead admit it as
fundamental, giving an account of how it
relates to everything else in the world.
 P R I N C I P L ES O F CO H E R E N C E

The most promising way to get started in developing a

theory of consciousness is to focus on the remarkable
coherence between conscious experience and cognitive
structure.

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 P R I N C I P L ES O F CO H E R E N C E

1. Reliability Principle (Second-order judgements) - When

I judge that I am having an auditory sensation, I am usually
having an auditory sensation. When I think I have just
experienced a pain, I have usually just experienced a pain.

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 P R I N C I P L ES O F CO H E R E N C E

2. Detectability Principle - There is an experience, we

generally have the capacity to form a second-order judgment
about it. Of course many experiences slip by without our
paying any attention to them, but we usually have the ability
to notice them: it would be an odd sort of experience that was
unnoticeable by us in principle.

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 COHERENCE AS A PSYCHOPHYSICAL LAW
If consciousness is always accompanied by awareness, and
vice versa, in my own case and in the case of all humans, one
is led to suspect that something systematic is going on. There
is certainly a lawlike correlation in the familiar cases. We can
therefore put forward the hypothesis that this coherence is a
law of nature: in any system, consciousness will be
accompanied by awareness, and vice versa.

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 CHAPTER 7:
Absent Qualia
Fading Qualia
Inverted Qualia
Dancing Qualia

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 THE PRINCIPLE OF
ORGANIZATIONAL INVARIANCE
Concept:

1. Consciousness arises in virtue of the functional

organization of the brain
• Chemical and quantum substrate is irrelevant

• Brain’s abstract causal organization

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 THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL
INVARIANCE
Concept:

Functional Organization is best understood as the abstract

pattern of causal interaction between parts of a system

Claims that conscious experience arises from fine-

grained functional organization

Principle of organizational invariance:

“any system that has conscious experiences, then any system that has the same
fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical
experiences.

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 THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL
INVARIANCE

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 ABSENT QUALIA
Concept: “Conscious experience must be absent”

Arguments for the absent qualia objection usually

consist in the description of a system that realizes
whatever functional organization might be specified

Hypothesis:
A system that functionally duplicates the mental
states of a normal human being has no phenomenal
 consciousness (no qualia).

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 INVERTED QUALIA

= Inverted spectrum

The hypothetical concept of two people sharing their color

vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees
are systematically different from the colors the other person
sees.

Same functionality but will not share fine-grained

functional organization

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 FADING QUALIA
Describes a slow withering or conversion of
qualitative experience

Gradual-replacement scenario

Example: replacing a certain neuron by silicon chips

Replacement will make no difference to the overall

function of the system

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 DANCING QUALIA
Concept: “Experience no Change until a key point”

Say a neuron, gets replaced. At that point I either

switch of lose qualitative experiences. But we can
imagine my qualia on and off (making them dance)
by switching between the last neuron and the
replacement. I still behave before, so despite the
disappearance and reappearance of qualia I notice
no difference.
Hypothesis:

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 NONREDUCTIVE FUNCTIONALISM
Forms of property dualism about experience as with
certain forms of physicalism

Conclusion:
this paper can thus be seen as offering support to
some of the ambitions of artificial intelligence.

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 CHAPTER 8:
Consciousness and
I n f o r m a ti o n :
S o m e S p e c u l a ti o n

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 1. TOWARD A FUNDAMENTAL THEORY
Connections between consciousness and physical processes

Components of final theory of consciousness:

1. Coherence principle connecting consciousness to

awareness
2. Connecting the structure of consciousness to the structure
of awareness.
3. Principle of Organizational Invariance

All express regularities

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 2. ASPECTS OF INFORMATION
Discussed different concepts of information in the
space of contemporary ideas

Information = message
Bit – most basic sort of information (0 or 1)
Example: Binary message

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 3. SOME SUPPORTING
ARGUMENTS
Two minor supports:
1. The principle of structural coherence
2. Principle of organizational invariance

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 4. IS EXPERIENCE UBIQUITOUS?
We find information everywhere
compact disk player realizes information
car’s engine realizes information
even a thermostat realizes information

All information is associated with experience

Most information processing is unconscious

-unconscious information is realized in EXPERIENCE

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 5. THE METAPHYSICS OF
INFORMATION
Metaphysics

Is information primary, or is it really the physical and the

phenomenal that are primary, with information merely
providing a useful link?

Information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.

Physical properties and laws may be derivative from

informational properties and laws

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 PART 4

APPLICATION

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 CHAPTER 9:
S t r o n g A r ti fi c i a l
Intelligence

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Could a machine be conscious? Could an

appropriately programmed computer truly possess
a mind?”

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Two types of Artificial Intelligence

• Weak artificial Intelligence – suitably

programmed machines that can simulate human
mental states

• Strong Artificial Intelligence – suitably

programmed machines that are capable of
human-like mental states
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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Three primary tasks of human consciousness:

1. We have the ability to consciously represent the world

through beliefs, desires, perceptions, feelings, and emotions

2. The ability to reason

3. Our minds initiate actions.

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A mathematician named Alan Turing (1912-1954)

devised a skill-based test to determine whether a
computer could think.

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“At best, a computer might provide a simulation of

mentality, not a replication. The best known objection in
this class is John Searle's "Chinese room" argument
(Searle 1980). According to these objections, computational
systems would at best have the hollow shell of a mind: they
would be silicon versions of a zombie.”

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Searle's Chinese Room experiment has generated many critical

responses from defenders of strong artificial intelligence.

Searle is only exposing flaws with the Turing Test for artificial
intelligence, but he does not expose problems with the
possibility of strong artificial intelligence itself

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The goal of strong artificial intelligence is to create a

machine with human-like mental abilities, which
includes self-awareness.

The question now is whether intelligent machines of

the future might qualify as moral persons.     

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

This raises a second moral question about artificial

intelligence: do we have a responsibility to future generations
of humans that might be adversely affected by the creation of
menacing robots? Should we stop our research into artificial
intelligence right now before we create something that we
cannot control?

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 STRONG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Science fiction author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) proposed

moral rules that should be embedded into the
programming of all superior robots, and one of these is that
a robot should never harm a human.

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 CHAPTER 10:
T h e I n t e r p r e t a ti o n o f
Quantum Mechanics

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 QUANTUM MECHANICS

Quantum mechanics is arguably the best scientific

theory we’ve got in predicting outcomes of physics
experiments.

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 QUANTUM MECHANICS

 "the problem of quantum mechanics is almost

as hard as the problem of consciousness."

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 QUANTUM MECHANICS

Chalmers describes his position as a naturalistic

dualism, also known as physicalism. He doubts that
consciousness can be explained by physical theories,
because consciousness is itself not physical.

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 QUANTUM MECHANICS

Chalmers says that a "fundamental theory of consciousness"

might be based on information. He says that "physical
realization is the most common way to think about information
embedded in the world, but it is not the only way information
can be found. We can also find information realized in our
phenomenology."

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 QUANTUM MECHANICS

Chalmers restates his view of the "hard problem" in a

recent publication:

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of

experience. Humans beings have subjective
experience: there is something it is like to be them

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